Platform

Box Platform: Powering the Next Generation of Enterprise Software

I’m incredibly excited about the developer engagement we’re experiencing on the Box platform. More than 35,000 developers are building on Box. Every month, our platform sees 1 billion third-party API calls and the Box OneCloud ecosystem just reached 1,000 app integration partners. It’s not just devs that are leveraging our platform – over the last year, usage of third-party apps by Box customers increased 292%. All of this growth shows that Box has a tremendous opportunity to help our customers and developers build a new generation of enterprise software.

This morning at Box Dev, we announced several important updates to the platform that enable customers to consume Box in an entirely new way and provide developers with a new set of tools that can help transform how individuals and businesses create, consume and collaborate around content on Box and beyond. Today is an important day for the Box platform and I wanted to provide a deeper look into how Box developers and customers can tap into these new services and offerings.

New Platform Products: Box View & Metadata

Box View provides the most elegant content viewing experiences on the web and mobile by taking documents and converting them to HTML so they can be displayed in high fidelity on any device. This is the evolution of the Crocodoc technology that Box acquired last year and provides developers a new rendering service for content that can be used in any application that displays documents.

The technology is being used by more than 100 businesses, including Zendesk, Oracle, Xero, UberConference, Clio and Producteev by Jive to provide a great user experience around content within their applications.

For example, when a UberConference caller is logged into UberConference.com, they now have the ability to upload files from their computer to share with others on the call and are instantly viewable thanks to Box View. In Xero, an online bookkeeping service, when a small business owner or accountant uploads supporting documents for their financial records (such as an invoice), the files are instantly viewable within Xero’s web application by leveraging the View technology.

In addition to this new offering, we are excited to open source viewer.js, our custom viewing technology that allows developers to build unique ways to display content, including carousel views, flip books and animations. You can access viewer.js at the Box Github repository. Like all open source projects, we encourage developers to contribute back so everyone in the community can benefit.

Box View is our first standalone service for developers. There is a generous free tier for a Box-branded viewer, and usage-based pricing for custom and large volume viewing experiences. For more details on Box View, check out the blog post here, review the documentation or get an API key to start building for free. Expecting a lot of volume or want to create a custom experience? Contact the team at api@box.com.

Announced as a private beta in September, we’re excited to share that metadata is now available in public beta. Metadata allows developers to add context to their content stored in Box and is part of the Box Content API. Metadata is now built into our mobile SDKs (iOS, Android and Windows) and incorporated in our search engine. We've also seen some exciting partners integrate metadata into their applications already, including GoFormz for form filling and Taptera for improved sales productivity. We can't wait to see what other app developers come up with! Check out this blog post for the full details on how to get started with metadata.

New Content API Pricing and Platform Customers

Box has always provided developers with free access to its APIs. As we’ve grown, many of Box's enterprise customers have leveraged our platform to build custom applications, streamline business processes and automate workflows. These customers include Sungevity, Guaranteed Rate, Sunbelt Rentals, Full Resolution Health, Random House, MediCopy, McLarens and many others. To address this growing customer demand, we’re introducing new enterprise pricing plans today for our Content API – designed specifically for businesses that want to leverage the APIs at scale. You can learn more about these pricing tiers here.

We're continuing to strengthen the core of what we do at Box by constantly improving our content platform offering with new functionality like metadata. At the same time, we will continue to build new broad base tools for developers, starting with our Box View technology. Our mission is simple: we'll build the best products to power the content and data for your applications – leaving you free to focus on building the best apps to help companies take advantage of the massive changes in how people utilize software for this new information economy.